Funny how this story appears on the CBC website, but I can’t find mention on a US website:
Canada could be left out in the dark unless it follows an American plan to extend daylight time by two months.
The U.S. Congress on Tuesday adopted the provision, which is part of a sweeping new energy plan. It would mean people would turn their clocks forward one hour on the first weekend of March and “fall back” on the final weekend in November.
Currently in Canada and the U.S., daylight time runs from April through October. The exception in Canada is Saskatchewan, which keeps its clocks the same throughout the year.
Congress believes the extension would trim energy costs by cutting the need for artificial light in the evenings.
What’s interesting is that with this change, Daylight Savings Time will be 9 months long, and “regular” time will be only 3 months. At this point, they should just make Daylight Savings Time our regular time, and regular time into… well, something else. Heck, just do away with both and set our clocks to DST permanently!
Isn’t it silly, the whole DST system? This is a system devised to create more daylight, by forcing everyone to change their clocks and pretend that it’s a different time than it is. Why, I wonder, didn’t we just do things an hour earlier without changing the clocks? For instance, a business could change working hours to 8am-4pm. Farmers could just get up an hour earlier rather than rely on fiddling with the clocks.
Weird.
Update: Reuters has the story for America. They report this interesting tidbit, which points out how stupid and ineffectual our energy policy is:
U.S. lawmakers working out details of a broad U.S. energy bill voted on Tuesday to expand daylight-saving time by two months to conserve energy, but refused to boost mileage requirements for gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles.
Gasoline accounts for 40% of our oil use. Proponents of the DST plan say it will save 100,000 barrels of oil a day by extending daylight so we don’t turn on lights. Of course, the extra two months mean that most of us will be up and out before daylight, thus turning on the lights in the morning instead of the evening. Brilliant. And by the way, flourescent bulbs will cut that energy consumption much more. I don’t know about you, but even when it’s daylight outside, every office and business I know of still has every light on. Where’s the savings? A boondoggle, I say. It’s just a way to pretend to do something while actually doing nothing.
I am so with you on this. I have long railed about the idiocy of Daylight Savings Time, and especially the way in which it’s touted as though it were some mystical change in the nature of time. I’ve often said that if it’s that damn important, then we can all just get up an hour earlier and go to school or work an hour earlier; if we have to try to psychologically fool people into doing so, is it really that important?